Three "Prisoners" of V.A. Zhukovsky: poetic auto-translation strategies

This article first entirely covers the only remained V.A. Zhukovsky's manuscript of his "Prisoner" ballad German translation (1850) preserved on his note-book pages. The article determines the cultural-historical and creative context which impelled the author to make the auto-translation. Zhukovsky's auto-translation strategy is recognized by comparison with another German poetical ballad translation published by F. Tietz in 1838 and unknown to Zhukovsky studies before. In general, it is impossible to call the "Prisoner" translation prosaic or interlinear, because it is full of artistic expression means, typical for a poetic technique. The analogues of syntactical, lexical and phonetic levels tie the German text by thin artistic threads, which characterize Zhukovsky's song lyrics and ballads and appear as the basis of auto-translation architectonics. Zhukovsky follows the melodic resemblance principle, in the frame of which there is an accent on the stanza short line rhythm transmission. In the Russian text the lines create an original melodic refrain of the romance type. In the German translation Zhukovsky tries to preserve the complex poetic enjambement system, laid by the unique stanza structure the poet developed. The peculiarities of Zhukovsky's strategy become clear in the context of the German translation made by F. Tietz. In principle, it had other parameters in genre and themes. Teitz's translation does not copy the original version narrative structure, lyrical-epic potential and strong dramatic phonation, typical for Zhukovsky's ballad. It gets a purely lyrical realization, turning into a young man-prisoner's love romance. Tietz gives back the concept sphere of Zhukovsky's ballad in the frame of the sincere German Romanticism. By hypothesis, Zhukovsky made the auto-translation because he was not satisfied with the existent F. Tietz's translation. Zhukovsky's work demonstrates the intention to the wholeness of the source material transmission both formally and semantically. The "Prisoner" auto-translation has poetic text characteristics (except the rhyme). The author succeeded in preserving a part of expression means and the rhythmical structure, made with the help of the former. Also, there was an attempt to save the stanza structure. In the context "to copy the "Prisoner" translation", the manuscript without corrections shows a rather high quality of the German artistic style which the author learned in the last years of his life. Being in the prison of conditions which did not allow Zhukovsky to come back from "foggy Germany" to the homeland, he turned to the main composition plot and made it full of his new autobiographic and aesthetic content. The German ballad manuscript, which greatly completes our conception about his late heritage, brings attention to the question of a systematic study of author's and authorized German prose and poetry translations by V.A. Zhukovsky of the 1840s and 1850s.

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